


Wise Tale

by Domimagetrix



Series: Gentili e Sculacciati [12]
Category: Runescape (Video Games)
Genre: AU - Mobster, Adult Language, Alcohol, Gen, Mention of Military-to-Civilian Reintegration Difficulty, Multiple Timelines, mention of suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-18
Updated: 2019-03-18
Packaged: 2019-11-23 17:50:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18155078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Domimagetrix/pseuds/Domimagetrix
Summary: Wahisietel relaxes, and prepares for the inevitable point where three anchors must meet and be aligned toward a common purpose. He reflects on his life on Earth, and the effects of the Shift.





	Wise Tale

_Old men should be explorers_  
_Here and there does not matter._  
_We must be still and still moving  
_ _Into another intensity._

       -T. S. Eliot

 

Wahisietel returned to the chair from which he’d excavated Razwan, a fresh bottle of whiskey in one hand. In the other, a lantern swung gently from its handle, complaining at the cessation of progress with a wider swing as he stopped to sit. He set both items on the table, then fiddled with the lantern’s wick knob until the paltry light had grown bright enough to write by.

The lantern was an old thing, double-encased in glass, the innermost interior clouded with congealed oil its previous owner hadn’t seen fit - or known - to remove. When it’d come into his care he’d done everything he could think of to clean the inside, but vinegar and water had only managed to thin its brown filter to the sullen yellow of old cheese. His effortful scrubbing had revealed the interior glass to be frosted, a design he appreciated, but it was one he would’ve enjoyed a bit more without the impossible task of removing oil resin from its Mammonistic surface.

He smiled faintly as he grabbed his notebook and selected a pen from the table’s undershelf. He’d gotten the thing from another vet with whom he shared a vertical-split duplex before moving here. After returning home from his last tour overseas, still a rigid adherent to the Army’s scheduling for all things personal - and a year away from realizing that the days wherein he had to justify extra seconds spent shaving were behind him - he’d met his neighbor and known. He’d been medical and his neighbor a grunt, true, but even a chaplain would’ve stepped outside for his paper at five-thirty, dressed for the day, seen another man needlessly put together outside his doorstep for his own paper, and drawn the logical conclusion.

Their acquaintanceship had begun properly with James Tolhurst’s inter-apartment chess tournaments. His neighbor’d done well by country and unit, losing his right leg in payment for staying behind with another injured soldier during evac, and found himself wanting for structure same as Wahisietel. The “tournaments” had been short-lived once the mill went under and other residents had moved on, but Tolhurst remained with Wahisietel for close to a year after. They were well matched over game board as they were room and board.

One early afternoon James had come down from his upstairs apartment with the unfortunate-looking lantern and handed it over without preamble. He’d answered Wise’s lift of eyebrow with his jarring blend of upper New England Yankee - probably Maine - and the table scraps of wherever he’d moved to in early adulthood. _“Seen ya keep candlelight at night, oldtimah. Figure ya c’n do ‘er better burnin’ midnight oil if ya got a proppah oil to burn.”_

Wahisietel set his notebook on his leg. Four days before Tolhurst had taken his own life, he’d shown up with the lantern. And given him the mismatched chess set that still took place of pride on a small table near the fireplace mantle. The human vet had been shedding belongings a week beforehand, too, with Wise understanding nothing until too late.

His gaze left the lantern and alit on the chess set sitting quietly in the warm spectre of foggy brown light.

Tolhurst had been tidying up after himself. Army through and through, but it’d taken his life as surely as sepsis from the gunshot wound he’d suffered had taken his leg. By then, Wise had begun spending more time in the shower and waking up when he damned well pleased, _Il Vuoto_ or no _Il Vuoto,_ but James Tolhurst had still risen at five, shaved in five, and the water upstairs near the front of the apartment never ran longer than five.

Wahisietel looked back at the lantern. Some built a new relationship with civilian life when they came home. Others didn’t. He’d intercepted two other vets he’d met with similar difficulties since then, but the loss of Tolhurst still sat like a splinter under the fingernail, wiggling and collecting bacteria. Sick-heated pain.

Razwan half-snored and hummed in her sleep, bringing him back to the present.

_Supposed to be organizing everything, not wandering off down Memory Lane._

But, he thought as he settled himself in the overstuffed easy chair with a heel perched against the frame of the armrest, time’s what this was about, wasn’t it? Past, present, and whatever hand the Shift played in the future. The bizarre cross-section of time that’d been excised from Gielinor and planted here on Earth, then pushed and patted into place with a bricklayer’s trowel. Events being reenacted despite the more-or-less universal knowledge that it’d all happened before.

_Befores. Many befores_. Wahisietel leaned out toward the table and helped himself to the whiskey, feeling it swirl first under then around his tongue before it went down in a heavy swallow.

He put his pen to paper, prodding himself back into focus. Into getting everything down so there’d be a reference for when the other two inevitably showed up at his door. He put a little dash on the paper in a preemptive attempt to keep his points separate, knowing the chances of it working were slim.

  * _We’re all from a magic world, and this one doesn’t suffer magic gladly._



It was true. Earth refused to play kind host to magical expression. They _could_ spellcast and enchant, but those things were either reduced to a tiny fraction of their former glory or short-lived. In the strange hysteria that’d followed their arrival, they’d attempted teleports more than anything, and discovered Earth had a springy whip in her hand to rebuke casters and users. Pain answered their usage, more or less of it depending on the magic’s intensity, and enchanted items found themselves subject to a hyper-accelerated entropy, even strong materials crumbling to inert dust after a small handful of uses.

The effect was getting worse. Earth was impatient with their magic. With them, too.

  * _We’re losing ourselves. If we don’t get back to where we belong…_



He stopped, tapping the side of his pen against the edge of the notebook. _And here we begin theorizing._

Compound memories from multiple timelines sat like stew set to a roiling boil in his head, the truth from one becoming dominant for a time before settling back like vegetables pulled to the surface and drawn back down.

_She lived with me for a time. They both did._

_He stayed._

_She didn’t. Too much a stray cat._

_There was a sock on the door._

_There was no sock._

_He wouldn’t have bothered with a goddamned sock._

Wahisietel tried to press the thoughts back down into the current, and they obeyed, albeit reluctantly. A few stragglers were sucked to the surface again before submerging and remaining submerged.

_She grew. Overcame. I know there’s strength in there; I’ve seen it. It’s buried, not gone._

_He grew. Overcame. Damned if I know how, still, but he found a place in the world._

_And she was a limping dog guarding her trash heap the moment she returned from the arenas._

The tumbling bits of thought sank away. He knew his impressions had been tinctured by the crossed wires of his other selves’ perceptions, but he didn’t think he was quite off the mark, either. He scraped another hard dash against the paper and made a note for himself-

  * _Razwan is the weak link. -_



-and only for himself. Of the three, only Razwan’s life had improved as it’d been reshaped to fit this world. It was a thin advantage, but undeniable. She would play a critical role in getting the others to a point of agreement, he was pretty sure, but her place in this world was, for all its prejudices magical and mundane, one that’d left her whole. Going home meant fracturing again.

He hated it. Unlike the other two, she saw him as a traitor, complicit in what her father had done. Sending her away with Godblessed. He’d had no part in it, and hadn’t been aware for over a year, but perspective didn’t extend to her. He didn’t know whether to be straightforward about what she’d face or leave it be. Perhaps a lie was better.

He adjusted his position anew and rested the notebook against his leg. The clock behind him chimed the hour with tinny matter-of-factness.

_I don’t have a choice. None of us do. Ten years ago, I couldn’t eat. Five years ago, I could eat and process what I’d eaten, even that damned lump of salt the mess had the temerity to call “chicken.” Now I have to. And Freneskae is starting to feel like a dream._

This part of the universe - or this other universe, whatever it was - was siphoning away who and what they were, fitting them into itself. Theory, but he had a suspicion that feeling and knowing weren’t distant from each other where the Shift was concerned. Another ten years, maybe twenty, and he wouldn’t remember Gielinor, either. Earth was a jealous thing.

Despite the low burn of unrealism-softened horror, Wahisietel found himself thinking again of Tolhurst.

A few months into their association, after the mill’s closing and chess had become their business, Wahisietel had read his upstairs neighbor a poem. Auden’s Hermetic Decalogue had plucked the first thread, one that would later unravel itself and others from the tight weave of habitual military efficiency in his head, and he’d hoped Tolhurst would sense the same potential in Auden’s words as Wahisietel himself sensed.

_“Listen to this, James._

 

_‘Thou shalt not do as the dean pleases,_  
_Thou shalt not write thy doctor’s thesis_  
_On education,_  
_Thou shalt not worship projects nor_  
_Shalt thou or thine bow down before  
_ _Administration._

_Thou shalt not answer questionnaires_  
_Or quizzes upon World-Affairs,_  
_Nor with compliance_  
_Take any test. Thou shalt not sit_  
_With statisticians nor commit  
_ _A social science._

_Thou shalt not be on friendly terms_  
_With guys in advertising firms,_  
_Nor speak with such_  
_As read the Bible for its prose,_  
_Nor, above all, make love to those  
_ _Who wash too much._

_Thou shalt not live within thy means_  
_Nor on plain water and raw greens._  
_If thou must choose_  
_Between the chances, choose the odd;_  
_Read The New Yorker, trust in God;  
_ _And take short views.’_

_“What do you think?”_

There’d been a pause while Tolhurst saw to his coffee and sat down, stirring a tooth rot’s supply of sugar into the bitter brew. He’d stared into his bachelor’s breakfast, then smiled up at Wahisietel.

_“Man, grammar school was part of my real life. Now I’m lucky if I can parse the funnies, much less understand anything in the New Yorker.”_

They’d laughed. “My real life” meant different things for both men, but it’d amounted to the same. Before the war, before the Shift.

Tolhurst’s lack of comprehension reminded him of Razwan’s disbelieving, half-processing attention earlier. He wasn’t sure how much she understood, but he had a suspicion that the ramifications hadn’t set in.

They’d need to. For all of them. His memories of their real lives - the Gielinorian ones, at least - weren’t going to last another decade. He had an idea it was true of all of them.

  * _Sliske. Nomad. The plan._



And that last. The plan. All three would need Sliske and Nomad. Their separate, individual versions of them, too. Both were critical for all three. They wouldn’t quite have each other when the time came to-

There was a knock at the door. Wise looked toward it, noting the dim light of sunset had disappeared entirely.

There weren’t many who’d show up at his door at this hour.

_So much for prep work. Outline in five, show up in five._

He stood, sliding notebook and pen beneath the table.

_And now it begins, I think._


End file.
